Multi-robot energy-aware coverage control in the presence of time-varying importance regions

Abstract

Multi-robot systems are becoming widely popular in applications where a rapid response is required or where various different robotic capabilities are required. Applications such as surveillance, or search and rescue, would require an efficient team that can be deployed and optimally dispersed over the environment. This is known as the coverage control problem. The solution to this research optimization problem is affected by several external aspects, such as characteristics of the environment as well as factors that pertain to the robotic team. This work proposes a novel solution to the complete coverage problem where the team of robots is restricted with energy limitations, and must cover an environment that has time-varying regions of importance. Our results show that in a realistic scenario, where the robots have limited energy for the task in question, the proposed solution performs significantly better than a typical coverage algorithm which disregards the energy considerations of the robotic team.